Hearts Under Siege
by roisaber
Summary: A brief look into the life of one woman who does what she must to survive in a city torn apart by war.


Was it possible to be a Jedi and a whore at the same time?

This was the question that inevitably ran through my head as I took one last look at myself in the mirror before going out. The right look was hard to achieve. I had to look pretty but not traffic-stoppingly gorgeous. Enough cleavage to draw wandering eyes up to my own, but not so much that the Ethics and Standards Committee hauls me in for an interrogation. The authorities would turn a blind eye to my activities only for as long as I could remain unobtrusive. Draw too much attention, and, well, there are stories.

My screencomm pinged as soon as soon as I changed my status to active. Either a client have had me on a waiting list – those are the good ones, they're always glad to see _you_ in particular – or they'd been stalking my profile waiting for me to appear, which could sometimes be creepy. Well, may as well get on with it.

 _Hey gurl id love to meet you in person :)_

 **Okay, when and where? You read the contract right?**

 _Dont be silly sweetie its all good revolution hotel room 386 as soon as your pretty ass gets her_

Well, at least it was on the good side of town. As in, not the side of town currently being shelled.

I exited the front door of my apartment and didn't leave until I heard the reassuring thumps of the lock bolts being automatically closed. This was a city under siege, and even if you were spared losing your earthly possessions to a "rebel" artillery strike, a sufficiently desperate person might still try to break in, Ethics and Standards be damned. Fortunately, the firing seemed pretty light today. In fact I hadn't heard the characteristic, dishware-rattling thump for a couple days, at least. Just as I thought that a burst of bright light from the east indicated that a plasma shell would soon climb lazily up into the sky before crashing down – somewhere. To my surprise, there was a brief flash of light and then I watched the plasma shell, obviously a dud, fell right back down on where it was fired from. I wondered how many rebels would die, and felt nothing.

My aircar costs me four hundred and fifty credits a month, or fully half my rent. But it's a business expense. There's places I have to go where they'd turn away a workhorse Areo cargo van, or worse, a retrofitted rebel hovertechnical. I had to own an upper middle class convertible at minimum, and the mortgage on it, plus the required insurance, was bleeding me dry. But there was no helping it. Besides, I loved my bright red, tri-engine aircar, Cherrybomb.

She flared to life at the brush of my fingers.

"Hey girl, how was your nap?"

Of course, the aircar couldn't respond. Voiced models gave me the creeps. If I'm going to talk to an inanimate object it could at least have the courtesy not to talk back. I announced our location to the car's navicomputer, and let it drive me off northwards, towards the financial district of Bergrad's capital city, Singi. Off in the east, smoke jostled its way into the atmosphere, rising above the own goal of the destroyed rebel position.

Don't ask me about politics. I don't really know or care about the disingenuous idiots on all the telescreens. They're all liars, anyway. All that matters is for the fighting to stop and people to get back to their normal lives. But it seems like that's never going to happen. Too many people think they've got too much to win, or imagine that they've got too much to lose, or are just going on to try to save face. There's no rhyme or reason to it. Food costs a fortune. The electricity sometimes goes out for days at a time and it's almost impossible to get a home generator smuggled in from offworld anymore. Raw sewage backs out onto the streets and doesn't get cleaned up; the garbageman needs to be paid cash upfront and then doesn't come half the weeks he says he will.

It's a tough job market out there, that's for sure. You're either a black market entrepreneur, like me, or you've got a job pushing paper for the bureaucracy that changes every week. It's kind of funny, in a dark sort of way. Nobody can make real plans for the future in this environment but life still goes on. I know I certainly didn't plan to go from daddy's little princess with all the possibilities in the world – and even moreso, when my Force potential was discovered – to a prostitute. But life works itself out in funny ways at least until it stops.

Jedi are supposed to be bound by a strict moral code. Or at least, that's what I guess; my potential was discovered just before the civil war broke out (the least civil kind of war) and offworlders quickly evacuated, leaving me behind with my family. My dad died in a bombing. My mom died in a car crash. Then it was just me and a city torn by war. The morality of the saintly Jedi belongs to people who are in a different situation from me.

There were hardly any aircars on the three dimensional freeway leading into downtown, and that didn't surprise me. When people could avoid going out, they did, and the other aircraft were probably carrying the last salarymen on the planet who still had a productive job. I watched the dim blue sky out of the glassy aircar roof. I let Cherrybomb pilot herself – I had a lead foot, and the last thing I wanted was a run-in with Ethics and Standards. The aircar alighted in the Revolution Hotel's parking lot, and I got out and sent her on her way. She had standing instructions to find herself the cheapest place she could possibly park. I entered the hotel's nearly-empty lobby and waited for my client to come collect me.

There's three kinds of hotels in this world. There's seedy ones, where the sheets are stained but they don't give one deciliter of tauntaun spit who you are or what you're doing there, just so long as the bill is paid. There's the rich ones, where everyone is so very refined that they mostly just pretend to not notice you. There are a lot of reasons to be pissed off at rich people, but their discretion is not one of them. It's the ones in the middle that are the worst. It's the ones with the upper lower middle middle class families who can still somehow afford to visit the capital zoo, mostly intact. It's the ones with clerks who are better than you, and who know it as loudly as they can. And it's not just an academic concern; they can make my life miserable, if they choose to. Prostitution wasn't _technically_ illegal on Bergrad, but if someone takes a disliking to you and brings in Ethics and Standards, there's always some _technicality_ they can bring up against you.

The Revolution Hotel was one of the places in the middle category. I bowed slightly upon entering as planetary custom, and – rudeness of rudenesses! – the clerk didn't so much as cast her eye at me. I don't know what convinces them they're so much better than I am. Is it that seeing me makes me ask themselves just how far they are from being in the same position? Oh well, it doesn't matter what she _thinks_ just so long as she leaves E &S out of things.

So I waited, and by tender mercy, the client didn't allow me to wait for long. He broke into a broad grin the moment he saw me, and I allowed a coquettish smirk to cross my lips. We bowed simultaneously, at just the culturally appropriate distance. Me more than him, and I felt rather than saw his eyes brush across my breasts.

"Aria! It's good to finally meet you," he said, a little too loudly for my tastes.

I answered out of the side of my mouth, conscious of the stinkeye being given to me by the receptionist. "Why don't we go back to your room?"

"Okay, sure!"

As we walked, I gently brushed against his aura with mine, searching for the chilly vibrato of deceit or malice. Instead, the man seemed like a genuinely cheerful moron; just another businessman hoping for a chance to cheat on his shrewy wife while he's in the capital. He walked quickly and I was a bit pressed to keep up with him. By the time we got to the top of the stairs – the elevator was out of order – I was low on breath.

"You walk fast," I panted.

He smiled. "I do everything fast. Wait, I didn't mean –"

I couldn't help myself; I laughed. I composed myself as quickly as I could. Making the client feel like an idiot wasn't a good business proposition. Still, he laughed too, and the worrying moment passed. He keyed us into his hotel room with a swipe of his thumb. We stood there, just inside the doorway, while he looked at me for a long time.

"Aria, you're really beautiful."

I shrugged my shoulders demurely, almost unseating the fresh pink flower on my shoulder that cost me an arm and a leg.

"Can I touch you?" he finally asked.

This was without a doubt the worst part of the entire transaction. Far worse, in fact, than the actual sex, though there were some men who managed to turn the sex act into an undertaking. I'd never figured out how to do it correctly.

"Of course," I said carefully, knowing that I was saying all the wrong things. "But first, please, uh… the fee?"

He dug through his wallet with a look of chagrin. "Oh! Sorry, I've never done this before, and I wasn't sure –"

I took a step forward and put my hand on his shoulder, feeling his warm breath intertwine with mine.

"Don't worry about it," I said 'softly' but probably more like a nervous whisper.

He held up a charge card.

"Do you take PanGalactic?" he asked sheepishly.

I felt a hot surge of anger erupt inside me.

"Didn't you read the contract?" I barked. "I _clearly state_ , in bold letters, numerous times, that it's cash credits only! It costs me money to gallivant across town you know; what am I supposed to do with a PanGalactic card? Run it down my asscrack?"

He looked so colossally embarrassed that I almost felt bad for him. But getting my aircar's fuel cells charged was anything but cheap, and if he didn't have cash, I'd just wasted a half hour of time.

"Er, I'm so sorry, please just give me a minute and I'll go to a credit dispenser! I'm really, really sorry, I guess I didn't read…"

I sighed. "Fine, but I'm still billing you for the time."

He practically fled from the room.

What an idiot, leaving a whore alone with all his personal belongings. If I were a different sort of girl, I would have left right then and there, loaded down with as much loot as I could carry. I'm such an idiot. I guess I do have a moral code after all, even if it's fucked up. Even though I promised myself that I wouldn't take anything, it might be amusing to just _look_ …

His suitcase was mostly filled with clothes. He had a couple business suits, a little wrinkled from their journey. Enough pairs of socks to last him a month – confirming my suspicion that my client had a wife. From the look of what he packed, I had a pair of bulging tighty whites to look at when he finally came back an undressed. There was a pair of swimtrunks with a bunch of cartoon religious figures on it – somebody with better taste would have found it borderline blasphemous. The guy was a galaxy-class dork.

There was a datapad charging at his bedside, but he at least had sense enough to lock the contents behind a two process passphrase. A pair of flipflops rested gracelessly at the foot of his bed. I was just about to turn on the telescreen to see what was on when my client came back, red-faced with exertion.

"I ran all the way there and back!" he explained with an evident – and misplaced – sense of pride.

He handed me the money, seemingly oblivious to how close he came to being left stranded in a strange city significantly lighter on worldly possessions. I really am an idiot. I took the credit chip and gave his aura one last feeling out as I did so. No trickery so far as I could tell – this guy was either majorly trained enough to pull one over on me, or at least _he_ believed the currency was legit. I sighed and slipped it into my cash clip, itself clipped onto the inside of my dress. He seemed to need me to take the lead, so I leaned back into his bed and unfastened the corsage from my shoulder, freeing out of the top of my dress.

What's there to say about the sex? It went in, it went out, and at the end there was a puddle underneath. Usually the sensation was not unpleasant. Sometimes it was actually fun. I try to make them feel like they're doing a good job; they come faster, and it just seems polite.

"That was great," my client rasped at the end of our session.

"Mmm." I leaned over and kissed him, letting my boobs press against his – let's face it – a bit overweight chest.

"Did you enjoy yourself?" he asked, propping himself up on an elbow.

These guys. I'm not your wife; in most cases, you'll never see me again. So what do you care? It must be something about the male ego. A manly man gets to have sex with a whore, but a _very_ manly man can even make a whore cum. I'm not going to say it never happens, but if I came so many times a week, I'd never be able to sit down properly. But it was all part of customer service. I know, I know; pun not intended.

"It was good," I moaned, hopefully convincingly sultry.

We spent a few minutes in the afterglow, and I didn't mind it. But the moment he started talking again, I gathered up my clothes and made for the washroom. I dabbed as much as I could, but you can't ever get all the wetness out, especially if you've had sex more than once on the same day. I got dressed, double-checked my credit clip, and carefully seated the pink corsage back onto my right shoulder. My client was looking at me a little mournfully when I came out of the toilet.

"You're a beautiful woman, Aria," he said.

"Thanks. But I'd better get going now," I said a little distantly.

"No really, you are. Is there any chance you'd let me take you out to dinner?"

"Sorry, I don't date."

His eyes fell. "I guess you wouldn't, would you."

I felt an inexplicable need to defend my profession.

"Some of the girls do date, you know. Some of them even have husbands. But dating's just not for me… I've lost too many people already."

His gaze went to the window, and the pillar of black smoke rising out of the distance. "Oh. This is your homeworld."

"Yeah."

There was a brief silence, which I relieved by making my way to the door and quietly letting myself out.

He hadn't been so bad, really. The truth was most people weren't. Like any other customer service job, you got a few really entitled or dangerous assholes; a few sterling examples of humanity; but mostly people, just people, looking for a little fun between the cradle and the grave. I summoned my aircar with my screencom. Goddamn it, she hadn't found anywhere to park cheaper than just driving around, burning through my half-depleted energy cells. Well, I guess it can't be helped.

I winced as I gaze upwards as she came to meet me. There was still an ugly, ragged gash in her hull, from the time I'd narrowly escaped from a sudden skirmish that had broken out all around me on the outskirts of the city. The Force had saved me then, I was totally sure of it. Maybe they'd mistaken me for a combatant. Maybe they just hadn't cared. Either way, when the rebel fired a homing rocket at my aircar, I somehow managed to spin it into a trajectory that the aerodynamics couldn't have possibly handled on their own, and the explosion just tore an ugly blackened wound across Cherrybomb's beautiful red paintjob rather than killing me completely.

I had just enough time to finish my grazerbeast shawarma when the next call pinged on my screencomm.

 _Yo shortie wut u doin r u free?_

 **** **Free if you've got cash credits. Did you read the contract?**


End file.
